This past winter has been very hard on nut trees, and on some other trees as well. In the first place, the cold weather of the autumn began very suddenly after six weeks of uninterrupted warm weather without any cool nights to harden the wood. In late September a few days of cool weather came, and then three nights in five with temperatures near 20°. The walnut foliage and some of the youngest wood turned black. Next came a winter with extremely low temperatures, with the minima ranging from 18 to 23 degrees below zero over our orchard land. Our four Persian walnut trees were killed back to the ground; three of them have sprouted this summer from the roots. Considerable leaf bud killing occurred on Chinese chestnut. One Japanese walnut died back to the ground and has sprouted from the roots. The other tree lost most of its younger wood, but some buds near the base of last season's growth have sprouted out to make a new top. Several specimens of the golden chinkapin (Castanopsis) of the Pacific Coast, which had made one year's growth here, were killed outright.
Most of the terminal buds and youngest wood of our nursery trees of black walnut were killed, but the trees have grown well this year from the lateral buds. In the woods some black walnuts which had been cut down about four or five years ago, and which had made sprout growth now about fifteen feet high, were killed back from two to four feet by the winter. A twenty-year-old Stabler black walnut on our lawn lost many of its top limbs, though the lower limbs survived the winter all right. Some other types of trees were also badly damaged: some locust trees were killed to the ground, and many others were killed to very old wood. A ginkgo tree on our lawn was killed back to the main trunk. This was one of the few times that I have ever seen injury on this species.
One of the five named varieties of filberts, Pal, escaped winter injury. DuChilly and Italian Red each have one good tree and one that was killed back to the ground, but is now sprouting from the roots. Of Medium Long, both trees have been killed way back. One tree of Cosford was killed completely, and the other tree has been badly damaged.
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President Davidson: Thank you, Mr. Clarke. Our family stopped on the way at a shelling plant where they were handling nuts by the ton, not the bushel, just the ton. I am not exaggerating. You have all heard the hill-billy program from Renfro Valley, no doubt, and we have with us today the man who is running that cracking plant and also this hill-billy chorus, Tom Mullins, who will tell us about what he is doing down at Renfro Valley.
Black Walnuts: A New Specialty at Renfro Valley
TOM MULLINS, Renfro Valley, Kentucky
Mr. Mullins: As Mr. Davidson said, I come from a little hill-billy section up in Kentucky known as Renfro Valley. Up until about a year ago the main commodity there was hill-billy music and a lot of noise on Saturday night. About last August our boss there kind of got interested in black walnuts. There were a lot of them going to waste all over the county due to the fact that most of our locals up there are kind of lazy. They don't like to get up there and stomp them out.
His original idea was to set up a hulling plant and hull the nuts and then buy the walnuts from the locals after they were dried. One thing led to another, and we talked to Mr. McCauley there, and Dad bought a big walnut plant to process black walnuts all the way through. He was new to it and so was I. He said, "Let's buy a million pounds of black walnuts." I didn't any more know what a million pounds of black walnuts was than I know how many grains of sand is in three or four buckets. It didn't take me very long, I think it was 31 days, and I bought 1,030,000 pounds. That's a whole lot of walnuts in anybody's language.
One of the local boys on our radio program came up with the bright idea that before in Renfro Valley we used to be just half nuts; now we are walnuts.